It comes as no surprise two "of America's top scholars," having released an article criticizing the hijacking of American foreign policy by AIPAC, the neocons, and the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are unable to get a hearing in the corporate media. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School "say that [AIPAC] is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication," reports United Press International. "They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and 'has a stranglehold' on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate."

Mearsheimer and Walt come close to stating what many of us have known for some time—a clique of Straussian neocons, wedded to radical Likudites in Israel, and share "close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy)," exploited nine eleven to "adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam" and push forward "preventive war," that is to say invasions of sovereign Muslim and Arab nations, a plan long in the tooth and at the heart of Likudite Zionism. Unfortunately, the authors do not arrive at the natural conclusion—not only did the neocons exploit nine eleven, they orchestrated it from within the Pentagon, as a previous cabal of Pentagon insiders, including the Joint Chiefs, attempted to create an earlier nine eleven by way of Operation Northwoods. Fortunately for the American and Cuban people, that earlier plan was eighty-sixed by Robert McNamara and John F. Kennedy. No such luck with nine eleven.

Mearsheimer and Walt name names—Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, key members of the inner circle of the neocon clique. It is interesting a name not normally associated with the neocons is mentioned—Bernard Lewis. It was the elderly "Arabist" Lewis who urged "Lebanonization" in the Arab and Muslim Middle East. "In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of 'Lebanonization'—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos," write Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg.

"Lebanonization" is a reference to the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement by the French under the League of Nations in the 1920s, dividing Lebanon into five provinces based along ethnic and religious lines. Of course, this artificial construct eventually resulted in a bloody civil war between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, exacerbated by the Israeli lebensraum policy of ethnically cleansing Palestinians (this conflict resulted in the death of over a 100,000 people and created 900,000 refugees), and was intensified and prolonged by an Israeli invasion and political and military participation by the United States.

Lewis concluded his Foreign Affairs article by predicting the "Lebanonization" of the entire region with the notable exception of Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties," a process well underway at this moment in Iraq.

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel," Mearsheimer and Walt continue. "The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?"

It is a situation, the authors conclude, created by the influence of AIPAC, an organization representing the Jabotinsky-Likudite faction in Israel. According to Thompson and Steinberg, Bernard Lewis' son, Michael, is "the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee's super-secret 'opposition research section.' This is one of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades." Defecting AIPAC staffer Gregory Slabodkin told the Washington Report in 1992 that AIPAC's secret "opposition research section" concentrates on "releasing derogatory (and generally false or misleading) information about American 'enemies of Israel' to their rivals in the media and academia."

Israel "works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life," the UPI summarizes the not destined for prime-time conclusions of Mearsheimer and Walt.

"Not surprisingly, the Jewish establishment organizations are lining up behind Aipac and not too subtly rolling out the traditional big guns by suggesting that the accusations themselves might be motivated by anti-Semitism," writes Michael Lerner. "Aipac and a variety of closely linked Jewish organizations regularly use the anti-Semitism card to attack anyone who dares criticize the occupation of the West Bank. Increasingly dominated by Jewish neo-cons and their worldview, the Jewish establishment has moved far to the right in the past two decades, spurred in part by Aipac's powerful impact."

As we know, the neocon "worldview" is one of endless conflict and misery abroad and subversion of American ideals at home. The Straussian neocons—and it is important to stress the Straussian aspect with its Machiavellian philosophy and fascist ideology taking cues from the authoritarian idealism of a Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt—are decidedly behind schedule on implementing the next phase of their master plan, gleaned in part from Oded Yinon's "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s", of attacking and balkanizing Iran.

Once again, Bush reminds us of the tight relationship between Israel's territorial aspirations and its connection to the military prowess (now in obvious decline) of the United States. "The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace," said our Caesar. "I made it clear, and I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel."

In fact, this is the only approach, as long ago sketched out by the Straussian neocons and their Jabotinksyite overlords, and diplomacy is but a shell game introduced to make the neocons appear reasonable, when in fact they are neo-Jacobin radicals. Bush's neocons, in control of the Pentagon, plan to eventually attack Iran, certainly not this month as initially speculated, but some time down the road, maybe this summer, maybe next year, but eventually, as the Straussian neocons, the anti-American AIPAC, and the reprehensible Israeli Jabotinskyite racists have long planned, even if it results in the ultimate destruction of America.